The Slow Path
by BlueFairy27
Summary: I went back to her estate in the Nineties, just once or twice, watched her growing up... Jack watches over Rose. But nine years later, when he sees her name in the newspaper, he knows it's time to move on.


It was the first real day of spring, with genuine sunshine that was quickly melting the last remaining patches of snow. Rose Tyler and her friends were playing an exuberantly disorganized game of kickball in the courtyard of the Powell Estates, shrieking and running back and forth. With a mighty kick Shareen sent the ball flying over Rose's head. It bounced twice and rolled across the street, to land at the feet of a man sitting at the bus stop.

"I'll get it," Rose called, rolling her eyes to show just how annoyed she was at Shareen for kicking the ball out of bounds. After carefully looking both ways, the ten-year-old jogged across the street, her dishwater-blonde hair streaming behind her.

The man had dark hair and was wearing a long coat that looked vaguely like something from an old-fashioned military uniform. He had picked up the ball, and he handed it to her now with a smile. "Here you go. Be more careful next time."

"Thanks!" She returned to her friends, and didn't notice when the man got up and walked away a few minutes later. And if there had been something a little wistful about his smile and the way his eyes followed her back across the street, something a little out-of-place about the way he was dressed, it didn't make an impression on her. Nine years later Rose would have forgotten him entirely, just another part of another perfect spring day, and she would never be entirely sure why the dashing young con man she was to meet during a trip to the London Blitz seemed vaguely familiar.

000

Jack Harkness sipped his drink as he sat in a pub on a Saturday afternoon, pouring through a newspaper article on the recent incident involving the metal men from another universe. He felt sure the Doctor must have been involved somehow, but there was no mention in the article of a mysterious man in a blue box. He'd missed him again: first there had been the failed Sycorax invasion several months earlier (he absently patted his knapsack, which contained a severed hand preserved in a jar), and now this.

He turned the page to find a list of the dead. He started skimming through the names, more out of idle curiosity than anything else, and then his heart stopped.

_Tyler, Jacqueline.  
__Tyler, Rose._

The Doctor had indeed been here, then. And… he'd lost Rose. Rose was dead.

Jack squeezed his eyes shut, fighting against the scream of frustration and grief he could feel building up in his throat. It was more than a century now on his personal timeline since he'd last seen her as the nineteen-year-old girl he'd fallen for head-over-heels the moment he'd seen her dangling from a barrage balloon over London, more than a century since he'd caught a whiff of her shampoo or touched her yellow hair, but he could still remember every detail of her as clearly as though she'd walked out of the room the moment before… and the Doctor, who had loved her just as much as Jack did, even though he was too much of an idiot to realize it… the Doctor would be alone now, again, as alone as he must have been in the first days after the Time War. Jack's heart broke to think of it.

He thought of her as he'd last seen her, as a ten-year-old girl playing ball with her friends, with no idea of what lay ahead. Oh, Rose.

He pushed back his chair and stood up abruptly from the corner table where he'd been drinking alone. He'd been waiting to catch up with the Doctor long enough. It was time he accepted that he might never find his way back to his Time Lord friend, time he started finding his own path. This Torchwood business… this was intriguing. Apparently the London branch had been destroyed, but the newspaper article had made a brief reference to a branch of the Institute located in Cardiff. To Cardiff it was, then. After all, what organization devoted to defending Britain against extraterrestrial threats (for that was clearly their purpose, despite the deliberate vagueness of the newspaper's description) couldn't find a use for an immortal from the future who used to travel through time and space with an alien?

Slinging his knapsack over his shoulder, he paid for his drink and walked out to meet his future.


End file.
